Agatha once told me that upon her first heartbreak, thrown over by a boy she’d adored, she’d run to her mother with quivering lips. Clarissa Miller had handed her daughter a handkerchief with one hand and raised the other with forefinger pointed, moving it up and down to mark her syllables. ‘Don’t you dare cry. I forbid it.’ Obedient by nature and wanting nothing more than to please her mother, Agatha had shuddered once, swallowing the tears as they threatened to fall.
But there hadn’t only been heartbreaks. In her youth she had been gay and lively, turning down one marriage proposal after another. In fact, when Archie pressed his hand upon her she was already engaged to another young man, Tommy, who was diffident and kind, and never – she felt sure of it – would have brought her to this moment, struggling to follow her mother’s erstwhile advice.
Archie didn’t sit beside her on the sofa, but settled into a wingback chair close enough for her to be able to reach for him. It was a natural gesture after the night they’d spent together and she gave into it, holding out her arms.
‘Agatha,’ came the hard reply, and then the words she’d been dreading for months. ‘There’s no easy way to say this.’
‘Then don’t say it,’ she pleaded, dropping her pathetic, outstretched arms and pulling Peter into her lap, stroking the dog to calm herself. ‘Please just don’t say it at all.’
‘I’m only telling you what you must already know. I love Nan O’Dea and I’m going to marry her.’
‘No. I won’t have that. It can’t be. You love me.’ The memories of last night hovered so clear, so close, it might still have been happening. Unlike Archie she hadn’t bathed. His scent clung to her, drowning out the lavender perfume. ‘I’m your wife.’
‘A divorce,’ Archie said. It was easier to just burst out with the word as a simple statement of fact. An end goal so obvious it needed no context, not even a complete sentence. What a triumph over emotion. Archie felt nothing, not even worry about his wife collapsing in front of him, only a commitment to the word. Divorce.
Agatha sat, silent. Her hand ran faster and faster over the terrier’s soft fur, her expression unchanging. Archie, unwisely emboldened, began to talk. He admitted our relationship had been going on for nearly two years.
‘You needn’t have told her that,’ I said later, though I knew he hated to be chastised.
‘You’re right,’ he admitted. ‘I was fooled by her silence. It was the last thing I expected. It was almost as if she couldn’t hear me.’
Turning too quickly to detail, he instructed Agatha to file for the divorce. ‘It will have to be adultery,’ he said. In those days that was the principle claim the courts allowed. ‘I’ve spoken to Brunskill . . .’
‘Brunskill!’ Mr Brunskill was Archie’s solicitor, an addled, moustached man. A new outrage, that he should know this assault lay in wait for her.
‘Yes. Brunskill says you can just say, unnamed third party. The important thing is to keep Nan’s name out of all this.’
Agatha’s fervent petting of Peter halted abruptly. ‘That is the important thing?’
Archie should have realized his mistake but instead he pressed on. ‘This might be in the papers,’ he said, ‘because of your books. Your name. A bit known, these days.’
She stood up, Peter falling to the floor with a reproachful yelp. Usually solicitous of the dog, she barely seemed to notice.
Archie remained seated. As he told me later, ‘There’s never any point trying to reason with a woman once she’s become unhinged.’
Agatha’s husband was in love with someone else. A life-changing transgression stated simply as the time of day. Now she was meant to receive this information with calm and dignity. Archie had broken rules with passion as his excuse and she was asked to rationally pick up the pieces. She was to take measures to protect her rival’s reputation. It was more than she could bear. She clenched her fists and let out a scream, loud and full of rage.